


in the bitter foam and brackish streams

by oriflamme



Series: stand still stay silent [1]
Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-11 16:03:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20156293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oriflamme/pseuds/oriflamme
Summary: Lalli wandered out into the Silent World, and came back with a soulmate. Onni’s never letting them leave home again.





	in the bitter foam and brackish streams

The stark mountains roll by. The carriage is large enough to contain the sprawl of legs and bodies of a dozen travelers, and yet - not large enough.

Lalli tucks himself up against the window to escape the press, half-curled around the edge so that the clear, cold air tugs on the edge of his sleeve and a stray sheave of hair. The rifle rests propped against the seat between them, always in easy reach.

Out of everyone here, Lalli is the only one who doesn’t crowd. His presence is a faint, familiar touch. When the package of bread starts to crinkle and sag, making a bid for the floor while Lalli dozes, Onni shifts his arm to brace it between them. Lalli twitches, one eye cutting open, then skims back under the surface of sleep. Light, but familiar.

_People _have always weighed on them in different ways. Lalli leans out and away, gravitating to open space, ever on the verge of flight. Squirming and discomfited by the presence of even a single other person in close proximity. More content when he’s free to breathe, at home in the forest in a way Onni could never let himself be.

Onni’s tolerance is marginally higher, but the close quarters test him. He keeps his arms folded, roots himself in his place, and grits his teeth, a wall between Lalli and the rest of it.

(It was something Tuuri never understood. She flourished the most surrounded by new people, seeing new sights, immersing herself in the overwhelming, draining flood of conversation. Onni could get by, interjecting when absolutely necessary, but in this he related to his cousin in a way he could never seem to with his own sister. To her, what remained of their family was two awkward, impenetrable stones around her neck, to maneuver or maneuver around as needed. Her smile strained when Lalli checked out of a group conversation, when Onni fussed too much where others could hear.

He knows that he embarrassed her.

(Her name is a hole punched through his chest.))

On his other side (in the space where in a kinder world _she _would be), there is now an - unexpected consequence to accommodating Lalli. His…friend. His head lolled over when the carriage jolted early on, and now this…_Emil_ slumps on Onni’s arm, dead to the world from the neck up, a trickle of drool making its slow but unstoppable way from his chin to Onni’s shoulder.

Ordinarily, this would be irrelevant. Onni has stonewalled his way through worse, when an aloof expression and standoffish body language were not enough to dissuade someone from treading in Hotakainen space. Contact is not a visceral, stressful sensation for him the way it can be for Lalli – simply an annoyance. Lalli outgrew the stage where he’d bite and throw hands and climb trees to escape unwanted interaction, but only just.

But something about the situation chafes at Onni the longer the carriage ride drags on. He drums his fingers on folded arms, the line of his mouth thinning as the formless irritation prickles at him, but the Swede disregards him with oblivious, sleeping ease. The drool reaches the fabric of Onni’s borrowed jacket; he aggressively ignores it.

It takes him far too long to recognize that the subconscious, exasperating sensation is exactly that. _Subconscious_. Onni can’t sleep on command, but he can dredge up the prickling awareness once he realizes it’s there. He lets his eyes fall shut with a grimace and waits for the quiet, swirling dark behind his eyelids to resolve into something lucid.

Reynir is a foreign, bright-burning flame that he deliberately ignores. Lalli remains a faint, familiar presence – an afterimage of himself, neither of them deep enough in sleep to dream. Onni adjusted his boundaries to shelter Lalli as well as soon as he made landfall, through proximity alone. It was a relief to know him safe, after dealing with such a physical distance. It’s not enough to fill the gaping hollow where his insides should be - but it’s enough.

Somehow, he failed to notice the pale, red-dyed butterflies. They perch along the slope of Lalli’s too-thin back and flutter around Emil’s butter-yellow hair, one large enough that its fanned wings obscure half of his face, and settle along the narrow, glinting line that stretches between the two. There’s no detail to the insects – just the suggestion of wings, the _dream _of a butterfly – and for a second Onni’s first instinct is to slap them away.

Figments of the subconscious don’t just _manifest_ harmlessly. Lalli is too well-trained to let his mind wander so frivolously; Emil should not be able to at all. Mages drift over the upper reaches of the dream sea, exposed and aware, with all the abyssal depths of the hungry dead between them and the seabed where ordinary minds slumber, safe and unconscious.

But far below the levels of awareness, there is a connection. The sensation, Onni thinks, of a fuzzy, carelessly open mind right beside his head.

_You wake up_, the Swede thinks, obnoxiously audible. His mouth twitches up at the corner in his sleep.

_No_, Lalli thinks back, his mental voice a subconscious mumble. _You_. Every so often his loose hand bats lazily at a butterfly outside the window.

They seem to have been at this for some time.

One of the butterflies perches on Onni’s nose. He blinks, and it dissipates.

_How did they survive a day out there. _Onni doesn’t know whether to be appalled or distraught or both. If he starts flapping his hands around to clear the air, no one will know what he’s on about.

Lalli wandered out into the Silent World, and came back with a soulmate. He’s never letting them leave home ag-

Onni tamps down the lid on his emotions, before either the reflexive indignation or the cutting grief can escape him. If he yelled and tried to cross-examine Emil on his immunity, his career, his suitability to so much as blink in Lalli’s general direction now, absolutely no one would understand him, and Lalli would cover his ears once the volume reached intolerable levels, and Onni would almost certainly end up crying in public. Unacceptable.

(And Tuuri never _will _leave home again. Tuuri _will _never come home again.)

Instead, Onni breathes very pointedly through his nose for several minutes, until the urge to heave Lalli over his shoulder and sweep him back to Finland subsides.

The instinct cools further still when he considers what he must, inevitably, do once he returns. Not to Keuruu, but to Saimaa.

No. There’s nothing left for them back in Finland but death. Lalli has someone now. Even if said someone’s mind is a vague, illucid open door. Onni has never encountered someone not a mage like this. Perhaps the Swede’s rambling, radiating mind still lies too deep below the surface for it to be a vulnerability.

Still.

Onni cracks one eye open and peers down at the mop of golden hair weighing on his shoulder. There is little he can do from here – mostly awake, his kantele stowed – but he can attempt to encourage the Swede to tidy up his messy thoughts. Teach Lalli how to extend his defenses over another by example, at least.

Lalli can stay with him, and Onni can go without worrying that someone will follow. That is for the best. If there’s some price to be paid for all of their line leaving Finland and drawing that baleful eye back down on them, better he be the one to pay it.

(He has nothing left to give but this.)


End file.
